“Thine Own Self” (7×16)
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I liked this one a lot.
The main plot, with a damaged Data inadvertently exposing a village to radiation, is the stronger of the two. Ronald D. Moore’s script carefully violates the Prime Directive in such a way that nobody in Starfleet, including Data himself, is aware of it. The pre-warp civilization on the planet is at level of development equivalent to the Middle Ages. Data, in the process of (re)discovering radiation poisoning and its treatment, ends up teaching the village doctor and a young girl the principles of scientific theory as well as revealing number important discoveries. In so doing, he might have singlehandedly kicked off the Enlightenment for this civilization; who knows how many centuries his visit may shave off this species’s journey to the stars?
The secondary plot, with Deanna testing to become a full commander, is also strong. But it’s the kind of story that would have worked better in bits and pieces over the course of the season if TNG has been more serialized.
And it would have had more weight had Star Trek been more consistent with rank and responsibility. The episode ties the bridge officer’s exam to the rank of commander, but this doesn’t make much sense; until this episode, Riker and Crusher are the only two commanders on the ship. Lieutenant commanders and even lieutenants are regularly placed in command when Picard and Riker are not available. If they’d tweaked the dialogue so that the bridge officer’s exam was only the last requirement for promotion that Troi had yet to complete, I think it would have played better.
That being said, I did like the callback to “Disaster“, from season five. And Crusher commenting on how she liked command foreshadowed the possible future in the series finale:
In the possible future Picard visits, circa 2395, Beverly Crusher (now Beverly Picard) is the captain of the USS Pasteur.
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